Introduction necessary evil, pining for the moment when they would be able to re-
vert to the prior religion.^85 They largely fail to comprehend the fluidity
of boundaries between practices and beliefs of different groups. Despite
popular opinion at the end of the Ottoman Empire, the early years of the
Turkish Republic, and especially today, never were those who converted
in the name of Shabbatai Tzevi or their descendants simply Jewish.
If not simply Jews, were they at all similar to crypto-Jews? At first glance,
the Dönme present a similar case to the Jadid al-Islam, “New Muslims,”
Jews forced to become Muslim in nineteenth-century Mashhad, Iran, or
the conversos, “New Christians,” Jews compelled to convert to Catholicism
in medieval Iberia and their descendants, on the question of their “Jewish-
ness” and “crypto-Jewishness.” According to their origins, the Dönme were
Jewish converts to Islam and their descendants. Thus from a genealogi-
cal or ethnic point of view, one can consider them Jews until they began
intermarrying at the turn of the twentieth century. Scholem argued that
although the Dönme had “voluntarily left Judaism—or rather the religious
framework of the social and religious organization of the Jews,” they “re-
mained Jews at heart despite becoming Muslims formally,” like conversos.
That is to say that although Shabbatai Tzevi had contacts with Sufism and
Sufis, and he and his followers then converted to Islam, they remained
Jews, “the Jewish character of the Dönme was preserved in all matters of
consequence,”^86 and that one who leaves Judaism is still a Jew. In labeling
someone a crypto-Jew, one assumes that Jewish converts to other religions
wish to remain Jews. By masking their true identity, the crypto-Jews at-
tempt to protect themselves against annihilation. But this framework for
understanding crypto-religion derives from the particular historical experi-
ence of “antisemitism, religious persecution, and the dangers associated
with Jewish identity,”^87 such as the conversos and Mashhadis experienced,
since forced conversion can lead to the practice of crypto-religion. But the
followers of Shabbatai Tzevi who voluntarily converted faced none of this
when they emerged as an identifiable group. Whereas in Iran, the animos-
ity of Muslims ensured the persistence of the crypto-Jews, because neigh-
bors kept them under close surveillance and threatened them with death if
their observing Jewish law and customs was discovered,^88 in the Ottoman
Empire, the opposite was true: the Ottoman religious and administrative
authorities allowed the Dönme to live as Dönme without harassment. The
Jews were not a persecuted minority in the Ottoman Empire. As a corol-
lary, neither were the Dönme.